Drone Attack: How We Might Willingly Embrace The Surveillance Society

from the poisoned-chalice dept

It's striking how drones have passed from a mysterious weapon used to wreak destruction in distant lands to something that could well become a familiar sight in the skies of the US and Europe. Meanwhile, the technology is progressing rapidly, allowing drones to fly in synchronized swarms and even to be printed out by the sheet. But what might some of the effects on our daily lives be -- for example in the sphere of privacy?

it is entirely conceivable that, in 5-7 years, there could be drones that would follow your child as he walks to school. You can of course, already choose to monitor your child by giving them a cell phone and tracking the GPS device within it, but a drone would have several advantages. It would be harder for someone to destroy or "disconnect" from your child. It could also record and save remotely everything that is going on - in order to prevent anyone from harassing or bullying them. It might even remind them to look both ways before crossing the street, in case they forget. Or, because of its high vantage point, it could pick out and warn your child of cyclists and cars they failed to observe. Once your kid is safely at school the drone could whiz home and recharge in time to walk them home at the end of the day. This may all seem creepy to you, but if such a drone cost $100 dollars, how many parents do you think would feel like it was "the responsible thing to do." I suspect a great deal.

There are plenty of other obvious applications:

Protestors might want a drone observing them, just so that any police brutality could be carefully recorded for later. Cautious adults may want one however over them, especially when going into an unfamiliar or unsafe neighborhoods. Or maybe you'll want one for your elderly parents... just in case something happens to them? It's be good to be able to pull them up on a live feed, from anywhere.

But as Eaves points out, something important is happening here on the privacy front:

My larger point is that the pressure to create the surveillance society isn't going to come exclusively from the state. Indeed, we may find ourselves in a surveillance society not because the state demands it, but because we want the tools for our own useful and/or selfish ends.

It's the Facebook effect: people know that by using the service they are giving up lots of personal information, but that's a price they seem willing to pay in order to gain the benefits of social networking. Similarly, as drones continue to fall in price and become smaller with longer ranges, people may be willing to start monitoring themselves, even though there is always the risk of information leaking to third parties -- or being demanded by the authorities, just as information is obtained from Internet service providers today.

Given the continuing success of Facebook despite the well-publicized issues around privacy, there's probably not much we can do to stop people adopting drones in these ways -- and why should we, when they obviously offer clear benefits in many situations? The best we can do is to encourage people to think through the consequences of taking this road before we set off down it, accompanied by our swarm of personal drones.

And I hope the government sees it as a way to get its own surveillance agenda greenlit and encourages it.

Because you can't stop the future, state actors are going to droneswarm the privacy out of lives in time, so we might as well have cameras pointed both ways.

And, if the militarization of police in the USA is any indication, we'll need to have a huge publicly-available commercial drones market that can be modified to counteract the inevitable militarization of state surveillance drones.

Srsly... You don't need a drone watching your kid if the authorities are doing it right (ie: going after real criminals instead of file sharers). And if you are really concerned you escort your child. My mother did it till the point she thought I was good to go alone and she worked full time at the time. You can build an intelligent home to your elderly parents and attach life monitoring gadgets to them while they take a stroll (or even while at home) that will send you their location and warn you of any anomalies (ie: a heart stroke). A protest is composed of hundreds of ppl, I dare the police arrest thousands so just pick up the phones and record everything suspicious. All of the phones.

And I can see the skies getting drone crowded. I get this picture in my head of Tokyo and those huge crossroads where freakloads of ppl walk by. Just add one personal drone per 2 ppl and it would be amusing.

Drones are not necessary for our daily lives. And if the police must use those they should be limited by strict rules because otherwise it will be abused. If they could, they'd sneak on each an every person breathing to make sure he/she isn't a criminal so, yes, we'll have a drone for each citizen if they have their way. This power hunger must be contained.

I'm not against the police but we have plenty of evidence that they will go overboard if they are not slapped regularly and put back to their place.

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The first home computers were about 10 grand.. If you told someone in a matter of years they could get one for under a grand with 8,388,608 kb of memory compared to their 16-256kb they would call you crazy.
Really just look at technology today the rate it is increasing is insane.
The fact is in a matter of years computers will be more powerful then the human brain. Then in a matter of years from that a single computer will be more powerful then all the human brains in the world combined.
It's up to us to decide how to use that technology weather it's used for the good of man or to destroy. One way or another it will happen. Lets just hope we use it better then the first applications of nuclear.

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Personally I believe "privacy" will be a very different concept in the future, there will be no privacy in the streets and people will be more vulnerable to data being misused that is collected for other purposes like medical, which could greatly improve how we live, but it also brings the dishonest, blood sucking and opportunists.

Still I have no illusions, privacy as we know today is dead, and nobody will miss that more than I do. Instead I found ways to cope with what is to come.

Remember the video that came out a couple of weeks ago that had the quadrotors playing the 007 theme? Or also a variation of the Harvard Microbots: http://micro.seas.harvard.edu/

Those are the kind of drones you are looking at. As for charging, people might put up small waystations for induction charging like those fancy cell phone mats they have now.

Once they get cheap enough organizations that are into free expression could flood areas that are oppressing others to document crimes. In nonurban areas the lighter than air units such as the BlimpDuino could be modified to be temporary charging stations or relay points. Even using one as a carrier perhaps.

These would also make excellent temporary darknet relay points, or with enough infrastructure the sneakernet of the new age. Put a 32 gig usb stick on your drone, tell it to get to your friends house 2 timezones away, it flies out the window using it's internal GPS. Hops on the back of a drone vehicle heading the right way, jumps off a few miles away, lands on a starbucks for a recharge from the station there (giving up an email address for being able to send you coffee coupons of course.) Then it lands at your friends window. Granted the one in this scenario is more like the size of an android phone currently is, this is well in the reach of the technology as it already stands.

So yeah, bring on the buzzy overlords, the authorities watch me, me and the buds will watch back.

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I had this thought. How hard would it be to shoot a drone. And how hard would it be to have light armed drones to take down others. I'd buy one of those for sure if drones become the new sensation lmao.

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>>5-7 yrs? $100 drones? Entirely conceivable? I didn't think it possible but you guys are more disconnected with reality than ever over here.

Somehow I suspect that whenever these things become common enough to actually start causing problems you'll be part of the contingent that proclaims no one could have seen these privacy issues coming...

>>So we have thousands of drones of various sizes flying in all directions during the morning watching all these kids piloted by all these people that are barely functional in the morning...Yeah right.

Somehow I suspect you simply do not understand what the word autonomous means....

Drones bring real-world risks too

My local council even mandates non-flowering trees for some of their parks, in case flowers or fruit attract birds and endanger planes using Southampton airport. Similar considerations affect drones too.

This opens up all kinds of markets. What about a drone that follows you, doesn't record anything, just hits, shoots, jams, disrupts and generally destroys the efficacy of all other drones in the area? All accidentally or illegally of course, but you could probably order them online for 'academic' or 'training' purposes or some such.

What about teenagers with 22 rifles, paintball guns, potato guns, baseball bats, etc? Does no one remember riding around baseball batting mailboxes? Hitting these would be much cooler, and not a felony like the mailbox damage.

The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
Skynet fights back...

Something else I'm getting tired of in this country is all this stupid talk
I have to listen to about children. That's all you hear about anymore,
children: "Help the children, save the children, protect the children." You
know what I say? Fuck the children!

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where is this present day lala-land where you have any expectation of privacy in public settings?

the problem to me is this type of surveillance is way different than having an actual person following you and documenting your movements. these drones and cameras make this type of tracking cheaper, easier, and pervasive. now you don't even need to be a "person of interest". they can just track everyone, then hit up the database when there's a problem.

if they want to have actual manpower tracking me.. fine, there's probably a good reason [and a warrant]. and that manpower tracking will definitely stop when they have no more reason because it will cost time and money

"The best we can do is to encourage people to think through the consequences of taking this road before we set off down it, accompanied by our swarm of personal drones."

I'm not sure I understand this statement. To what end? So they think about it and our privacy is still invaded. Not just that of the drone owners' but also that of anyone who may not be a drone owner who is now being picked out by all the drones in the sky. Add facial recognition tech and now things get goofy. Gov't can get access to everyone's feed and piece together the movements of anyone whether they own a drone or not (oh yeah, try to stop them ;). Heck, this beats the London and NYC's efforts to stick surveillance cameras everywhere and relies on individuals' fears (oh yeah, it's for the children ;) much like the Patriot Act did, in order get this to happen w/o gov't mandate.

What's even more ironic is that the control we hope to gain from having such surveillance is a fiction. What actually happens is that we lose greater control over deciding how this new information about our person is used. Don't forget, once digitized information is very very hard to control with or without laws guarding its use. We learned this lesson with how info about us is currently collected, stored, aggregated and disseminated online through all of these social services. The entertainment industry also learned this lesson with music, books and movies. It will happen with this drone data too.

Hence, thinking about how we deal with our info online hasn't done any good other than increase its reach and distribution.

we're living in the future

recently in my town, there was a bank robbery. in an article about solving the case the police explained how they were able to piece together a very accurate timeline by looking at the surveillance cameras from small businesses in our tiny little downtown. noting when the robber's car drove by which store etc.

Yeah that was a corrupted mem-stick, but thousands upon thousands of drones all connected to the internet, getting their firmware updates over the net, getting their commands over the internet, with all those oh-so-security-concious netizens out there.

I'm really not worried about personal drones. Military ones yea, but even those will no doubt be hackable.

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I will go as far as to say that drones are a bad thing for our daily lives.

I understand why people would want to have a drone monitor their child on the way to school, but we need to be careful not to overdo it.
If you hold people's hand too much (and that includes children), they never learn. If your kid always has a drone reminding him not to cross the road without looking both ways, your kid will not develop important skills, such as thinking about consequences and planning ahead.
There's a difference between a child who thinks "I must look both way to be sure a car won't hit me" and a child who thinks "I must look both ways or the drone will scold me".

We are already seeing this phenomenon a lot in today's society: we have more and more laws, more and more safety warnings everywhere, and we also have more and more irresponsible parents who don't know how to raise kids and who don't care enough.
We also have irresponsible teenagers who do stupid stuff, such as stunts that are obviously going to end up with a severe injury (lots of youtube videos on those!). Why? When I was a kid, playgrounds had a concrete floor. Today, they all have sand or this rubber thing you find on race tracks. I once scratched my knee on a protruding nut and bolt while going down a slide (I bled quite a bit). Today, playgrounds have even tiny things like this covered to avoid the slightest injury. Kids grow up not knowing their limits, and one day you your child on youtube trying to dodge a friend's car coming at him at full speed, and getting run over instead. Or doing a dangerous skateboard stunt he obviously doesn't have the level for, without even a helmet, and getting a commotion. Children today just don't learn how fragile their body is and how easily accidents can happen - and as a result, they aren't cautious enough in their daily lives.

We must make people think for themselves and not protect them all the time. Yes, that means taking risks, but in the long-run it's better that way. Drones won't always be around to remind your kid not to play with scissors, not to lean over a railing, not to leave an electric saw turned on when he's not using it or not to light a match or lighter near inflammable substance or surfaces, such as synthetic carpet, papers or paint thinner.
If your child doesn't learn that his life is not guaranteed to be safe all the time, and that it's his responsibility to be cautious in order to survive, then your child will most likely not live long enough to graduate college.

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I found myself thinking along similar lines, but what was foremost in my mind was:

The NYPD brags about their anti-aircraft capabilities. I can just see a protest rally in 20 years, with black flak clouds bursting above the crowd as the police remove the camera drones belonging to the news media and protestors, before they wade in with batons.

Seriously?

Great idea: Drones that follow kids to protect them against the least likely threats (stranger danger!), while real threats (pedophile father/uncle/older brother/family friend) remain as much of a problem as they did before.

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They're actually very cheap, already. You're thinking of the DoD 'can't pay enough' unmanned stealth planes. These people are talking about something not much more complicated than 'toy' aircraft. Electronics get smaller and cheaper every day. The software for traffic avoidance is not just for the people at MIT, anymore.

I'm worried that someone will start using these to help rob houses or fine people for nonsense citations based on stuff you can't see unless hovering inside someone's yard.